Principals: Our struggle to be heard on reform

Several weeks ago, on Meet the Press, Michelle Rhee unveiled her new ad, designed to hammer away at how bad she believes American schools to be. The ad likened public schools to an unfit male athlete competing unsuccessfully in a women’s sport, say Carol Burris and Harry Leonadartos, for the Washington Post. Many found the ad to be offensive in its stereotypical portrayal of an overweight and effete man. But the true offense was that it took a moment of national pride, the Olympic Games, and used it to give American educators a kick in the pants. It is reasonable to wonder why it is so important for Michelle Rhee and other “reformers” to constantly deride and disparage American public schools. Although we should always seek to improve, why should those efforts be expected to follow from derision? In truth, while we and others see daunting and unfilled needs in many schools, there has not been a sharp and sudden decline in student performance as is being implied, and in fact scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — sometimes referred to as the nation’s educational report card — are higher than ever before. The answer is simple. School reform has generated a marketplace, and a profitable one at that…

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10 most inaccurate school reform axioms

Dov Rosenberg lists what he considers the 10 most inaccurate and damaging statements that some school reformers toss around, the Washington Post reports. Rosenberg, who loves to help teachers use technology, has been serving North Carolina public school students and teachers for 11 years as a teacher and instructional technology facilitator. Here’s Rosenberg’s list:

1. High-stakes standardized test data produce the fairest, most reliable, and least expensive evidence of student comprehension as well as teacher ability…

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Opinion: Can school performance be measured fairly?

More than half the states have now been excused from important conditions of the No Child Left Behind education law, the New York Times reports. They’ve been allowed to create new measures of how much students have improved and how well they are prepared for college or careers, and to assess teacher performance on that basis. Teachers will be evaluated in part on how well their students perform on standardized tests. One study, though, found that some state plans could weaken accountability. How can we measure achievement of students, teachers and schools in a way that is fair and accurate, and doesn’t provide incentives for obsessive testing, and cheating?

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Is a charter school chain called Rocketship ready to soar across America?

Inside a prefabricated beige building hard by the freight tracks, John Danner thinks he has solved one of the nation’s most vexing problems, the Washington Post reports. This is Rocketship Discovery Prep, one of five charter elementary schools founded by Danner that are bridging the achievement gap — the staggering difference in academic performance between poor and privileged children. The gap — which has persisted for decades despite heavy investments of time, energy and money — can cement the path a young life takes. Poor children are likely to enter school already behind, never catch up and then drop out, joining an underclass that threatens the country’s economic future. Policymakers, foundations and business leaders are ravenous for schools that can educate all children, regardless of income. And they don’t want just a handful of successes. They want a big idea, on a grand scale. Danner, a boyish 45-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur and onetime public school teacher, believes he has the answer…

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Watch: Teen author discusses problems with America’s schools

Fox Business interviewed 17-year-old Nikhil Goyal to get the teen author’s thoughts on how to go about reforming the nation’s school system, the Huffington Post reports. Goyal recently wrote a book about the problems with American schools titled “One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School,” due out in September. Included in Goyal’s recommendations for how to fix schools is repealing No Child Left Behind, abolishing Race to the Top and “reinventing the teaching profession.” He also takes issue with testing, referring to it as “harmful and inappropriate.” Goyal spoke to the importance of changing the model of the school system, which he claims still resembles the industrial model of the early 20th century, making it the one American institution that hasn’t changed…

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Opinion: America Has Too Many Teachers

President Obama said last month that America can educate its way to prosperity if Congress sends money to states to prevent public school layoffs and “rehire even more teachers,” says Andrew Coulson for the Wall Street Journal. Mitt Romney was having none of it, invoking “the message of Wisconsin” and arguing that the solution to our economic woes is to cut the size of government and shift resources to the private sector. Mr. Romney later stated that he wasn’t calling for a reduction in the teacher force—but perhaps there would be some wisdom in doing just that. Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs. Or would they? Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has shown that better-educated students contribute substantially to economic growth…

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Merit pay and ‘loss aversion’

Uh oh, educators, hold onto your hats! It appears that a new catchphrase is coming to school reform, and it’s called “loss aversion,” explains Larry Ferlazzo, a high-school teacher in Sacramento who writes a blog for educators and a teacher advice column. Loss aversion is a psychological finding that losing something makes us feel worse than gaining the same thing makes us feel better. A group of economists published a study two weeks ago implementing this strategy with students. They wanted to see if students would try harder on a standardized test if they knew they would get cash or some other kind of immediate prize if they improved on their results. They tried offering these rewards in a couple of different ways, but found the biggest test improvement would come if they gave the student the money ($20) or non-cash award before the test and then told them they would have to give it back if they didn’t score well. There are a number of issues with this study, including the fact that the gains do not appear to have carried over to carry over to the future and that it appears to be a relatively small number of students. The authors also appear to ignore recent studies that have shown that loss aversion can have particularly damaging effects on many people…

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The rat race of childhood: Why we need to balance students’ lives

In Aspen, Colorado each year, intellectual leaders from around the world meet for the Aspen Ideas Festival, presented by the Aspen Institute and the Atlantic. This year’s most Googled names attended the Festival’s most recent installment, held June 27-July 3, to present on the “big ideas” currently shaking up American society, from science and technology to the arts, education and culture, Vicki Abeles, a parent of three and the director of the documentary, “Race to Nowhere,” which challenges common assumptions about how children are best educated. Among them was Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton professor and former State Department official, whose recent piece in the Atlantic on the daunting systemic challenges and compromises faced by the working mother has dominated headlines and stoked fiery cultural conversation since its publication in the magazine’s July/August issue. Appearing at the festival in conversation with Katie Couric, Slaughter reiterated one of her article’s most salient reflections on work-life balance — or the lack thereof — in modern America: “Given the responses to my article, [it’s clear] there are many, many people — and many, many men — feeling like we have gone way too far,” she noted. “We’re working 24 hours on 24 hours, and we don’t have the time to be human beings in the round.”

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Colbert skewers Texas GOP on ‘critical thinking’

I thought I’d heard enough about the Texas Republican Party’s platform that rejects the teaching of critical thinking skills until I heard Stephen Colbert’s take on it, says Valerie Strauss, columnist for the Washington Post. I wrote about this recently here, quoting from the platform:

Knowledge-Based Education–We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

After this was ridiculed, Texas GOP Communications Director Chris Elam told TPM.com that it was a mistake and that opposition to “critical thinking” wasn’t supposed to be part of the platform. Since a party convention approved the platform, it can’t just be dropped, he said. Sure thing. Colbert returned to “The Colbert Report” from vacation this week and couldn’t resist taking a hilarious shot at this as part of a piece that is described on the show’s website like this: “The minds of young people are being poisoned by knowledge, but thankfully Texas is the Large Hadron Collider of denying science.”…Read More

Standardized tests of tomorrow behind schedule, according to insider survey

When asked about the problems associated with standardized testing — cheating, overtesting, blunt measures of student achievement — U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan often points to a duo of “next-generation assessments” funded by federal money, the Huffington Post reports. But a new survey, which consulting group Whiteboard Advisors plans to publish this week, suggests that “education insiders” aren’t so sure that the one of the new tests will resolve all of the issues with standardized testing. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed reported that they believe the Smarter, Balanced Assessment Coalition, one of the two state-based consortia developing the tests, is on the wrong track.

“Smarter Balanced seems to have started with a misdiagnosis of the testing program to begin with, and then gone from there,” one respondent wrote.

These new tests are funded by $330 million in stimulus money through the federal Race to the Top competition and are intended to measure critical thinking, particularly the critical skills emphasized by the Common Core State Standards, the set of educational standards most states have agreed to adopt……Read More

Readers: Five ways to motivate students

“Students need to know that someone truly cares about them when they are in a classroom,” said one reader.

We recently highlighted a report from the Center on Education Policy that looked at how schools can motivate students. Now, here are some of the best ideas from our readers.

We asked readers: “What are some ways/tactics/activities you implement to motivate students?” Their advice ranged from “be there for your students and let them know you care about them,” to “entice them with technology they use with their friends.”

Here are five of the best responses (some comments have been edited for brevity). What do you think of these ideas? Do you have any stories of your own for how to motivate and engage today’s 21st-century learners? Be sure to leave them in the comments section!…Read More